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The state changed some licensing requirements for 2016, and that likely affected the number of violations, because wardens focused more on educating hunters than cracking down, Schaller said.

“How people bought licenses, what they physically were given — in some circumstances, they could display the license with their driver’s licenses, sometimes they were given a conservation card, sometimes a paper printout,” he said.

“Because it was a new system, we did a lot of education in ’16. We were using a high level of discretion on enforcement. That certainly had an influence.”

The elimination of back tags last year likely had no effect on the number of violations or law enforcement’s ability to catch violators, Schaller said.

“We can say within the department it was very rarely we were called and given information based only on a back tag,” he said. “It was a tool, but it was not used very frequently. More typically, someone will get a vehicle description or license plate.”

Hunting without a license is not a rare occurrence, but it isn’t a major problem in the state, Schaller said.

“Our compliance rate is fairly high when it comes to the purchasing of licenses, I think,” he said.

Most people, even out-of-staters, know licenses are needed, and not too many people want to run the risk of a $299 ticket, he said.

Aside from the cost of the ticket, violators also are required to buy small game licenses, he said.

Some things the data show:

The 68 violations in 2016 not only are the lowest in three years but compare favorably to 2005, which had 99 violations, and 2010, which had 77.

Nearly a third of the violations in the last three years occurred during the nine-day deer-gun season.

“As you can imagine, we hear all kinds of stories about why they may not have had a license,” Schaller said. “I think probably the rationale we hear most often is they thought maybe the species they were hunting was covered by the actual license they had; say they had a deer license and maybe they were hunting coyote, and they’d say ‘I thought the deer license covered all hunting.’”

In 2016, only 10 violations of hunting without a license happened during the nine-day gun-deer season, and all of those were in the western side of the state. Six happened in Washburn County and two in neighboring Burnett County.